North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

RE: Switch advice please - followup

  • From: Mark Foster
  • Date: Fri Jul 22 19:06:01 2005

>
>
>  Thanks to everyone for their advice and stories. It seems the popular
> choice
> is Cisco with a close second of foundry. Even a nice mention of Dell
> switches.
>  Most people had nothing good to say about HP. (phew..  glad I asked you
> all) I
> completely forgot abt Foundry so they are my next stop!
>  Oddly no one mentioned 3com. I don't know if that's good or bad.
>
>
>  The sad part is I hate Cisco. Well I hate IOS. It is the most counter
> intuitive interface known to man. We currently have several 3550's and one
> that
> is still partially brain dis-functional after a "senior network engineer"
> at a
> hosting facility got a-hold of it to "help out".
>
>  To be honest I miss Ascend. Nice interfaces with actual menu's and
> interface
> for those of us who don't need 50 ways to do something or only find they
> need
> to touch their switches once a year for upgrades or whatever. You could at
> least wander through the menu's to figure out/remind yourself what to do.
>
>  If anyone makes a switch with this type of menuing that can actually pass
> lots of bits well and is not a consumer toy. I want to know  :)
>

Nortel?

3Com aren't too bad. From memory Nortel are actually better at higher
throughput levels.

Nortel has a GUI Device Management system via SNMP which is pretty good.
They also have intuitive HTTP access for most things and the console gives
you a menu or a commandline option.

Look at the Nortel 5510/5520/5530 switches for Gigabit throughput...

Mark.